The red dotted line shows a ﻿planned cycle path﻿ to run from Albert Rd level crossing through what's now fields to Church Lane Sholden and Southwall Road. It couldl form a much-needed "missing link" in the route for cycling between Deal town and Fowlmead country park, avoiding residential roads with lorries and lots of parked cars.Click on the picture above for a copy of the full plan.It's important to get it right, so please look at the details - would this be a good route for cyclists? See how it could fit in to the 2008 District Cycle Plan-->What do you think?Many of us visited the developers' (Quinn Estates) Consultation exhibitiont: in Deal Town Hall on Wed 4th March 2015 and told them what we wanted to see - there were some interesting discussions.These comments were sent inscroll down if you'd like to add a comment, too.

Ian C said: "The idea of an extra link for cycling and improving the road access here looks very promising. It would be useful to see how the cycle links through to Sholden work as this was not clear at the exhibition. Surely a road link here would also be useful to avoid people having to loop all the way around town and back into these homes and retail sites if they are coming from Sandwich?"Diana Gardens resident said: "I live in Diana Gardens in the alley between Diana Gardens and Church Lane. I am all for a cycle path and I hope it goes through. What I am worried about is we have more and more cyclist coming through the Diana Gardens alley and someone is going to get hurt. If you are going ahead with it please could you put kissing gates up or something like that so people get of their bikes and walk through there. We have a lot of children that play around this area."

Gregory Williams of Spokes says: "My initial impression is that it looks like the cycle path aspects of the design could be useful. However I note a few things from the proposed map: -The cycle path doesn’t appear to connect to Albert Road itself. It’ll be important to form this connection to able to provide the through route to Fowlmead, the accommodation being proposed, the proposed supermarket, and the proposed link to South Wall Road / Church Lane. Logically I’d see this linking to the on-road cycle route via St. David’s Road to the town centre, coast and NCR1; -I note the WNW-bound portion of cycle path proposed in the direction of Fowlmead is labelled “Possible future connection of cycle path”. Something more concrete than that will need to be stated to avoid the developer wriggling out of it at some later stage. Planning condition and requirement for developer contributions via S106 or CIL?; -Will the new proposed roads adopt 20mph? Will they be signed as such (KCC regularly say that new residential roads are designed to be 20mph, but then they don’t follow this up by signing them as such. I take issue with this because (1) it wouldn’t be legally enforceable; (2) people won’t get used to 20mph being normal if they don’t see it signed in the real world); -There’s a label about the cycle parking needed that states a minimum of 2 spaces per unit. The Kent Vehicle Parking Standards requires 1 space per bedroom for houses (I note that it’s 3 bedroom houses on the plan), or 1 space per unit for flats; -I don’t see a mention of the cycle parking for the supermarket. The logical place will be between the cycle path and close to the main store entrance. Cyclists should be able to cycle from the cycle path to the cycle parking. I make the 17000 sqft to be about 1580sqm. KVPS sets the minimum cycle parking requirement at 1 space per 400sqm for class A1 shops for this scale of land use. So that’d be a minimum of 3 spaces (almost 4). That’s too low, so I’d be arguing for a greater number of cycle parking spaces too; -I see that there’s parking for Albert Road residents. What about their bicycles? There is (sort of) a precedent already set; here’s an example in Cambridge: http://www.camcycle.org.uk/newsletters/111/article8.html